R Basics

Today we'll cover:

• Understanding R & R Studio
• Objects/Data Structures
• Packages
• Data Basics (importing/exporting data, viewing data, subsetting/appending)

The main goal is get familiar with the R environment.

R is a statistical and graphical programming language that is based off a much older language called S. It's source code is written in C, Fortran, and R. And it's completely free under a GNU General Public License.

What this means for us:

• No Barriers to Entry: easy to acquire, easy to contribute
• Active Community: if you can think it, there is likely a package out there that does it.
• Powerful and Adaptive: build an estimator from scratch, scrape a web-site, automate the coding of a dataset. All is within one's reach.

R offers a powerful way to

• analyze data
• clean excel spreadsheets
• migrate projects across platforms
• format and clean text
• manage any data source
• produce compelling graphics and maps

R Studio is a graphical user interface (GUI) for the R programming language. The software makes R more user-friendly adding some point and click functionality along with a complete integration of graphs, the data environment, and the coding script.

Think of it like this: R is the engine that runs all our commands, and R Studio is the leather seats and steering wheel. One does the work, the other eases how that work is done.

To install R, download R from CRAN via the following:

• Windows: https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/
• Mac: https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/

To install R Studio, download from the following:

• https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/

R Studio is broken up into 4 quandrants that can be arranged and customized to the users preference.

These quadrants are broken up as follows…

The console is where all the action happens. This is “R”.

All commands are processed through the console directly (that is, one can type commands directly into it) or via a script.

A script is a .R text file where we write and run code our code.

When we write a line of code, we can run it in the console by highlighting the text and…

• clicking run
• pressing command + enter (mac)
• pressing control + enter (windows)

Everything in a script will be treated as code – that is if you run it, the line will be processed through the console.

However, we can leave comments and notes to ourselves by commenting out sections of the script using a #

R uses a specific set of rules to goven how it looks up values in the environment.

We manage data by assigning it a name, and referencing that name when we need to use the information again.

Officially, this is called lexical scoping, which comes from the computer science term “lexing”. Lexing is the process by which text represents meaningful pieces of information that the programming langauge understands.

In simple terms, an object is a bit of text that represents a specific value.

x <- 3
x

[1] 3

Here we've assigned the value 3 to the letter x. Whenever we type x, R understands that we really mean 3.

There are three standard assignment operators:

• <-
• =
• assign()

“Best practice” is to use the <- assignment operator.

x1 <- 3 
x2 = 3
assign("x3",3)
cat(x1, x2, x3)

3 3 3

Note that lexical scoping is flexible. Objects can be written and re-written when necessary.

object <- 5
object

[1] 5

object <- "A Very Vibrant Shade of Purple"
object

[1] "A Very Vibrant Shade of Purple"

Down the road it will help to give objects meaningful names!

One can see all the objects in the environment by either looking at the user interface in RStudio (specifically, the environment tab)…

One can see all the objects in the environment by either looking at the user interface in RStudio (specifically, the environment tab)… or by typing ls() in the console.

ls()

[1] "object" "x"      "x1"     "x2"     "x3"    

Once assigned, an object has a class. A class describes the properties of the data type or data structure assigned to an object.

We can use the function class() to find out what kind of data type or structure our object is.

class(x)

[1] "numeric"

The object x is of class numeric, i.e. a number.

There are many classes that an object can take.

obj1 <- "This is a sentence"
obj2 <- TRUE
obj3 <- factor("This is a sentence")
c(class(obj1),class(obj2),class(obj3))

[1] "character" "logical"   "factor"   

Understanding what class of object one is dealing with is important — as it will determine what kind of manipulations one can do or what functions an object will work with.

As noted, there are many different data types in R. We will primarily run into the following types:

When need be, an object can be coerced to be a different class.

x

[1] 3

as.character(x)

[1] "3"

Here we transformed x – which was an object containing the value 3 – into a character. x is now a string with the text “3”.

Objects offer a way to reference different data. This means that we can play around with a lot of different data type simultaneously.

This makes it easier to:

• manage and use multiple datasets at the same time
• extract and manipulate single variables
• work with little bits of data at a time to make sure your calculations work.

Note that the only way to hold onto information is to assign it as an object! Else the information is printed but instantly forgotten by R

A function is a type of object in R that can perform a specific task. Unlike objects that hold data, functions take arguments and return the output of some manipulation.

A function is specified first with the object name and then parentheses. For example, the function log() calulates the natural log of any number placed inside the parentheses.

log(4)

[1] 1.386294

Functions operate in the background.

There are a number of functions in R, known as base functions, that are always running when you turn R on.

When we need to do things that are not a part of the base functionality, we can import new functions by installing packages. But more on this later.

We've already come a across a few functions, and we'll learn a lot more moving forward. Just keep in mind that whenever something is wrapped in parentheses (), it's a function.

Here are examples of a few common base functions that we'll see.

All functions in R contain rich documentation regarding how a function works, the inputs it requires, and example code. We can access this documentation by using ? in front of the function.

?c()

There are also many ways data can be organized in R.

The same object can be organized in different ways depending on the needs to the user. Some commonly used data structures include:

• vector
• matrix
• data.frame
• list
• array

X <- c(1, 2.3, 4, 5, 6.78, 6, 10)
X

[1]  1.00  2.30  4.00  5.00  6.78  6.00 10.00

class(X)

[1] "numeric"

length(X)

[1] 7

data.frame(X)

      X
1  1.00
2  2.30
3  4.00
4  5.00
5  6.78
6  6.00
7 10.00

matrix(X)

      [,1]
[1,]  1.00
[2,]  2.30
[3,]  4.00
[4,]  5.00
[5,]  6.78
[6,]  6.00
[7,] 10.00

list(X)

[[1]]
[1]  1.00  2.30  4.00  5.00  6.78  6.00 10.00

array(X,dim = c(2,2,2))

, , 1

     [,1] [,2]
[1,]  1.0    4
[2,]  2.3    5

, , 2

     [,1] [,2]
[1,] 6.78   10
[2,] 6.00    1

We need to understand the structure of a data object to understand how to access the information inside.

There are many ways to organize the same piece of information in R, and different data structures afford us different advantages and bring with them different limitations.

Throughout this short course, data frames will be the dominate data structure that we use; however, as you become more acquainted with R, you'll see and use other types of data structures more often.

One must understand the structure of an object in order to systematically access the material contained within it.

Let's use a dataset inherent to R called cars. There are a number of datasets that are built into R. These are for demonstration purposes.

Note that these data will not appear in the environment until we assign them to an object.

data <- cars
class(data)

[1] "data.frame"

An easy way to see what's inside a data object is to just print() it. R prints objects automatically in the console.

data

   speed dist
1      4    2
2      4   10
3      7    4
4      7   22
5      8   16
6      9   10
7     10   18
8     10   26
9     10   34
10    11   17
11    11   28
12    12   14
13    12   20
14    12   24
15    12   28
16    13   26
17    13   34
18    13   34
19    13   46
20    14   26
21    14   36
22    14   60
23    14   80
24    15   20
25    15   26
26    15   54
27    16   32
28    16   40
29    17   32
30    17   40
31    17   50
32    18   42
33    18   56
34    18   76
35    18   84
36    19   36
37    19   46
38    19   68
39    20   32
40    20   48
41    20   52
42    20   56
43    20   64
44    22   66
45    23   54
46    24   70
47    24   92
48    24   93
49    24  120
50    25   85

We can look at the structure of a data object by using the str() function.

str(data)

'data.frame':   50 obs. of  2 variables:
 $ speed: num  4 4 7 7 8 9 10 10 10 11 ...
 $ dist : num  2 10 4 22 16 10 18 26 34 17 ...

We can leverage what we know about the dimensionality of the data to extract parts of it.

We do this by using brackets [] alongside the data object. We then can access the dimensions in the data by specifying the row and column

data[row,column]

The function dim() can tell use about the dimensions of a data object.

dim(data)

[1] 50  2

We now know that the object data has 50 rows and 2 columns.

data[,2] # Access the entire 2nd column

 [1]   2  10   4  22  16  10  18  26  34  17  28  14  20  24  28  26  34
[18]  34  46  26  36  60  80  20  26  54  32  40  32  40  50  42  56  76
[35]  84  36  46  68  32  48  52  56  64  66  54  70  92  93 120  85

data[49,] # Access just the 49th row

   speed dist
49    24  120

data[1,2] # Access just a cell

[1] 2

The key is to keep in mind the dimensions. We can't access data that isn't there.

data[51,]

   speed dist
NA    NA   NA

Most data objects can be accessed using $ call sign.

$ acts as a key by which we can extract a specific variable or data feature.

If we hit Tab after specifying the $ after our data object, R Studio will offer a list of all available variables.

Here we call the speed variable from our dataset.

data$speed

 [1]  4  4  7  7  8  9 10 10 10 11 11 12 12 12 12 13 13 13 13 14 14 14 14
[24] 15 15 15 16 16 17 17 17 18 18 18 18 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 22 23 24
[47] 24 24 24 25

Let's get hands on with this.

Open your R Studio session and open basics_script_part1.R.

There are a number of packages that are supplied with the R distribution. These are known as “base packages” and they are in the background the second one starts a session in R.

A package is a set of functions and programs that perform specific tasks. By installing packages, we introduce new forms of functionality to the R environment.

To use the content in a package, one first needs to install it. One can do this by utilizing the following function: install.packages(). By inserting the name of a specific package, we can connect to an R “mirror” and download the binary of the package.

install.packages("ggplot2")

The version of that package is then saved on your computer and can be called at any time (on or offline).

Once installed, it's on the system for good. You can then reference or load the package any time you wish to use a function from it.

There are two functions we can use to load a package: library() and require().

library(ggplot2)

# or 

require(ggplot2)

You must load the package before you can use any function in it.

If you ever try to run a function and you get the following prompt…

Error: could not find function "qplot"

It's likely you forgot to load the package .

require(ggplot2) # First Load the package
qplot() # Then run the function
# Wah-la!

R doesn't intuitively know where your data is. If the data is in a special folder entitled “important_research”, we have to tell R how to get there.

We can do this three ways:

1. Set the working directory to that folder
2. Set the directory via a point-and-click option in R Studio
3. Establish the path to that directly to the folder

Every time R boots up, it does so in the same place, unless we tell it to go somewhere else.

We can find out which directory we are in by using the getwd() function.

getwd() # Get the current working directory

/Users/edunford/

Every time R boots up, it does so in the same place, unless we tell it to go somewhere else.

We can then set a new working director by establishing the path to the folder we want to work in as a string in the function setwd()

setwd("/Users/edunford/Desktop/important_research")
getwd()

`/Users/edunford/Desktop/important_research/`

R Studio also makes setting the working directory really easy.

Click: Session/Set Working Directory/Choose Directory...

This will allow you to set the working directly quickly. The downside is that you have to do it manually every time you return to this project. By writing a script for everything you do, it is easier to replicate (and for others to replicate) your work.

Finally, we can also just point directly to the data by outlining the specific path.

Here we are assigning a sting containing our path to the object path.to.data.

path.to.data <- "/Users/edunford/Desktop/important_research/data.csv"

We then load the data using that path.

read.csv(path.to.data)

Here we will review how to import five seperate data types:

• .dta — STATA file format
• .csv — comma seperated file format
• .sav — SPSS file format
• .xlsx — standard Excel file format
• .Rdata — R's file format

For STATA 12 <=

require(foreign)
data <- read.dta(file = "data.dta")

For STATA 13 >=

require(readstata13)
data <- read.dta13(file = "data.dta")

read.csv() and read.table() are both base functions in R.

data = read.csv(file = "data.csv",
                stringsAsFactors = F)
# Or

data = read.table(file = "data.csv",
                  header = T, 
                  sep=",",
                  stringsAsFactors = F)

These functions have specific arguments that we are referencing:

• stringsAsFactors means that we don't want all character vectors in the data.frame to be converted to factors.
• header means the first row of the data are column names.
• sep means that entries are seperated by commas.

For SPSS and SAS file formats, the haven packages offers a simple way of reading in data.

require(haven)
read_sav(file = "data.sav") # SPSS

read_sas(file = "data.sas7bdat") # SAS

require(readxl)
read_excel(file="data.xlsx")

.Rdata is the data source inherent to R. It saves and loads objects.

load(file='data.Rdata')

There is also a point-and-click option for importing and exporting data in R.

If we go into the Environments tab and then click Import Dataset

Exporing data is the same process in reverse. Instead of reading the data, we want to write a new version of it.

There are a series of functions (each provided by their respective packages) that allow us to do just that.

Though the arguments for each function differ somewhat, each require that you input the data that you're looking to export and specify the file name and paths to tell the computer where the file is going.

Assuming we have the foreign and readstata13 packages already loaded, we can create a new .dta file, using the write.dta() and save.dta13() functions.

write.dta(data,file="data.dta") # stata <= 12

save.dta13(data,file="data.dta") # stata >= 13

write.csv() and write.table() are both base functions in R.

write.csv(data,file="data.csv",row.names = F)

write.table(data,file="data.csv",sep = ",")

write_sav(data,file="data.sav") # SPSS

write_sas(data,file="data.sas7bdat") # SAS

.Rdata offers two options to save data. We can either save a single data object, or save the entire workspace

# Save just an object
save(data, file="data.Rdata") 


# Save the entire workspace
save.image(file="workspace.Rdata") 

Return to your R Studio session and open basics_script_part2.R.

There are some great resources out there to help you climb the R learning curve.

• CodeSchool's tryr – an interactive game to learn the basics of R.
• swirl – learn R from the consol. Swirl provides an interactive experience to learning R from within R.
• Some Suggested Readings:
  • The Art of R Programming
  • stackoverflow.com
  • Nearest Google Browser